Neo-Orientalist Narratives

Worlds in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Abstract

Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad garners global acclaim as an inventive adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel. It attracts researchers and critics who have emphasized the work’s grotesque and haunted atmosphere, violence, and war. However, other vital and pertinent themes and symbols are disguising behind tragic anecdotes and bloody revelations. Amid this, an absurd and chaotic dystopian Iraq emerges, where individuals from diverse backgrounds and positions mirror the ugly, ambiguous, and sinister aspects of life. Characters and their behaviors and actions elucidate degraded faculty and perception—a degrading picture of the entire country where all performances collapse. This paper argues that Saadawi propagates these tokens in an effort to portray neo-Oriental worlds and their sordid incidents. He sides with neo-orientalists who present the Orient from similar perspectives. The literary, aesthetic, and intellectual lexicon the writer pens is not a description but indeed a definition of land and its people. The paper investigates this trend by adopting some perceptions of neo-Orientalism as elaborated by Ali Behdad and Juliet A. Williams and contributing a deeper and novel understanding. After introducing the writer and discussing characteristic features of neo-Orientalism, two sections analyze the contents of the work. In the “Dystopian Institutions” section, I examine how Saadawi renders public and social services irrelevant to people’s demands and needs. I dissect the individuals’ behaviors and actions in “Human Degradation.”